Viktor Frankl
Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy — the 'third Viennese school' of psychotherapy after Freud and Adler — whose 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning, written in nine days after his liberation from Nazi concentration camps, has sold more than sixteen million copies and is regularly named among the most influential books of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna in 1905, Frankl survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering, and Türkheim; his wife Tilly, mother, and brother were killed. From the camps he distilled a single conviction: that human beings can find meaning even in unavoidable suffering, and that the last of human freedoms is the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. He went on to write more than thirty books, hold professorships at Harvard and Stanford, and lecture at over two hundred universities. Frankl died in Vienna in 1997.
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Quotes by Viktor Frankl
110 quotes“Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
“The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
“I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”
“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.”
“By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person.”
“What is more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.”
“Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities.”
“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”
“Live as if your second life had already begun, and as if you were about to make the same mistake you are now about to make.”
“There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.”
“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”
“You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.”
“A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life.”
“He knows the 'why' for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any 'how.'”
“It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation.”
“Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation.”
“It is known that humor, more than anything else in the human makeup, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”
“Man's search for meaning is the primary human motivation.”
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